Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
In addition, this page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Roasted Plovers
Pluck and singe the desired number of birds, take out the gizzards, but leaving the remainder of the entrails inside. Tie a thin slice of fat bacon over the breast of each bird, and range them in a hot oven to roast. Place in a drippingpan some slices of toast and baste them continually with butter; just preparatory to removing the birds from the fire, take off the rashers of bacon and dust them with salt; when the birds are done, place the toasts on a hot dish, with a bird on each, decorate with quartered lemons, and serve with a sauceboat of white sauce. (2.) Pick, singe, draw and wipe six tender and fat plovers, pick out the eyes, and truss the legs together, and skewer the head under one leg; then lay a thin slice of larding pork on each bird, tie them securely, and put in a roastingpan, seasoning with a little salt, spread over a very little butter, and put them on a spit, roasting for ten minutes, Then take them from the fire, and arrange six small canapes for game on a hot dish, dress the plovers on them, garnish with a little watercress, and serve. Salmis of Plover, Madison d'Or Procure six fat plovers, pick, singe and draw, pick out their eyes, skin the heads, wipe, and sprinkle over with a little salt; place in a roastingpan and cook for four minutes, then cut off the legs and necks, reserving the heads for future use. Chop up half a carrot and onion, put them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter and a small garnished bouquet and six whole peppers; cook for five minutes, add a breakfast cupful of Spanish sauce, half a wineglassful of sherry, and three tablespoonfuls of mushroom liquor, sprinkling over salt and pepper to taste; then cook them for fifteen minutes longer. Run the bills through good-sized mushrooms, stick them into the breasts of the plovers, and place them in a sautepan, strain over the liquor, and add a dozen mushrooms cut in halves and the zest of a lemon, cook for six minutes, then put them on a dish, strain over the sauce, and serve with croutons of fried bread covered with cooked goose's fat livers for a garnish.
Three preparations for a bird that no longer belongs on a menu. The problems here are legal and microbiological rather than culinary, and they are not fixable by adjusting the method.
- The bird itselfPlovers are migratory shorebirds protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and in Canada under the Migratory Birds Convention Act; in the UK and Ireland the European golden plover is still a quarry species in open season, though sale of wild-taken birds is restricted. There is no ordinary legal commercial source in North America, and several New World shorebirds hunted for the market in Oscar's day never recovered.
- The undrawn birdsThe first method removes only the gizzard and roasts the bird with the rest of the entrails inside — the "trail", prized by nineteenth-century gastronomes for its flavour. Intact intestine in a bird roasted to rare is a direct route for enteric bacteria into the meat, and no modern food-safety guidance countenances it.
- The timingsTen minutes on the spit in the second version, and four minutes of initial roasting in the salmis before it is finished in sauce; the first version gives no time at all. These are times written for a different understanding of risk, and game birds in a modern kitchen are handled like poultry for good reason.
- Heads, eyes and billsSkinning the head, picking out the eyes and running the bill through a mushroom as a skewer were standard game-service presentation. These are handled, unwashed parts of a wild bird, and here the bills go onto the finished plate.
- Terms in the salmisFor reading rather than cooking: a salmis is a dish of game part-roasted, then finished in sauce; "Spanish sauce" is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce; "garnished bouquet" is a bouquet garni; "goose's fat livers" is foie gras. "Madison d'Or" appears to be a proper name rather than a technique.
- If you want the dishFollow a current recipe for farmed quail or squab, from a licensed supplier, drawn and cooked to a safe temperature. The salmis structure — roast, joint, finish in a rich sherried brown sauce with mushrooms — carries over intact; the bird does not.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, near the end of the era when American shorebirds were an ordinary market commodity. Golden plovers and their relatives were shot in enormous numbers on spring and autumn migration and shipped by the barrel to city dealers. The recipes assume that abundance: six fat plovers, casually, and instructions to leave the trail in because that is where the flavour was thought to live. Within a few years the trade was under attack — the Lacey Act of 1900 restricted interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 brought migratory birds under federal protection, though several shorebirds, golden plover among them, remained on the hunting list until the 1927 regulations closed them. The Eskimo curlew, hunted alongside the plovers, is generally considered extinct. Pages like this one are a useful record of what a grand hotel served before that shift, and of how quickly a staple of the game larder can vanish from it.